Mother Angelica
Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation, PCPA (born Rita Antoinette Rizzo; April 20, 1923 – March 27, 2016), also known as Mother Angelica, was a Catholic American Poor Clare Nun best known for her television personality. She was also the founder of the internationally broadcast cable television network Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) and the radio network WEWN. EWTN became a voice for Catholics worldwide. In 1981, Mother Angelica started broadcasting religious programs from a converted garage in Birmingham, Alabama. Over the next twenty years, she developed a media network that included radio, TV, and internet channels as well as printed media. Mother Angelica hosted shows on EWTN until she had a stroke in 2001. She continued to live in the cloistered monastery in Hanceville, Alabama, until her death at age 92 on March 27, 2016. Early life Mother Angelica was born Rita Antoinette Rizzo on April 20, 1923, in Canton, Ohio, in a community of African-American and Italian immigrant mill workers. Of Italian-American background, she was the only child of John and Mae Helen Rizzo (née Gianfrancesco). Her father, a tailor by trade, abandoned the family when Rizzo was only five, and her parents divorced two years later. On March 10, 1931, her mother was granted custody of the young Rizzo, and her father ordered to pay five dollars a week in child support. Her mother only received "intermittent child-support payments from the father". While maintaining full custody, her mother struggled with chronic depression and poverty. This was in part because being a divorcée carried a social stigma at the time and the opportunities for a woman to secure income were limited especially in the height of the Great Depression. Looking back at her childhood, Mother Angelica described herself and her mother as being "like a pair of refugees". "We were poor, hungry, and barely surviving on odd jobs until Mother joined the dry cleaning business as an apprentice to a Jewish tailor in our area. Even then, we pinched pennies just to keep food on the table." The pair lived with her maternal grandparents, moving out for a time between 1933 and 1937, but were forced to return because of financial pressures. Matters were complicated when her grandfather, Anthony Gianfrancesco, suffered a stroke in their absence, which paralyzed him on one side and required him to use a cane. Education Rizzo attended a convent school, but disliked the nuns there, whom she recalled as being "the meanest people on earth" and treating her with harsh discipline due to her parents' divorce. She then attended Canton McKinley High School, where she was one of the school's first drum majorettes. She later told an interviewer, "I did very poorly in school. I wasn’t interested in the capital of Ohio. I was interested in whether my mother had committed suicide that day." Rizzo developed no intimate friendships in high school, partly because of her fear that it would further upset her mother, who might see other demands for attention as a threat. Rizzo never dated, recalling later, "I never had a date, never wanted one. I just didn't have any desire. I suppose having experienced the worst of married life, it was not at all attractive to me.". In 1939, Rizzo, feeling overwhelmed by crowd noise and school chatter, began to leave McKinley High in the afternoons. She was given calcium and nerve medication to treat what was deemed a nervous condition. When her mother's mental condition seemed to worsen, she made arrangements with her grandparents to have her sent to Philadelphia to be with a relative. Adulthood A stomach ailment that Rizzo had from 1939 continued to cause severe abdominal pain, despite the extensive medical treatment she received. Her mother took her to Rhoda Wise who was hailed as a mystic and stigmatic and "who claimed to receive visions of St Thérèse of Lisieux." Wise instructed Rizzo to perform a novena (a nine-day course of prayers) and made the girl promise that she would spread devotion to the saint if she was cured. On the novena’s final day, January 18, 1943, Rizzo declared that she woke up with no pain and the abdominal lump causing it had vanished. This experience profoundly touched her; she believed that God had performed a miracle and she traced her lifelong commitment to God to this event. She later told an interviewer "that point I knew that God knew me and loved me and was interested in me. All I wanted to do after my healing was give myself to Jesus." One evening in 1944, Rizzo stopped at a church to pray and felt that God was calling her to be a nun. She sought guidance from a local parish priest who encouraged her to begin visiting convents. Her first visit was to the Sisters of St. Joseph in Buffalo, New York, but the active congregation felt that she was better suited to contemplative life. She also visited Saint Paul's Shrine of Perpetual Adoration, a facility operated by an order of cloistered contemplative nuns, located in Cleveland, Ohio. When visiting this order, she felt as if she were at home. The order accepted her as a postulant, inviting her to enter on August 15, 1944. She was 21 years old. On November 8, 1945, Rizzo was vested as a Poor Clare nun. She received a new name, which her mother had chosen for her, and title, "Sister Mary Angelica of the Annunciation". Soon afterwards, the Cleveland monastery established a new monastery in her home town of Canton and she moved there. In 1946, as a young nun, Sister Angelica had an accident with an industrial floor-scrubbing machine that knocked her over and injured her spine, causing her ongoing pain and requiring her to wear leg braces for most of her life. Sister Angelica saw the occurrence as a divine sign and promised Jesus to build a new monastery deep in the Protestant-dominated Southern United States if she recovered. On January 2, 1953, she made her solemn profession of vows at Sancta Clara Monastery in Ohio. Category:Heroes with Faith Category:Catholics Category:Christians Category:Elderly Category:Deceased Heroes Category:Deceased Category:Religious Heroes Category:Female Category:Heroes